[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]
As was the case with yesterday’s subject William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca is a figure about whom I’ve had the chance to write a good deal:
As a central part of this We’re History piece on Malheur in Oregon.
As the focus of a chapter in my book Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011).
And numerous times on this blog, including here on how reading her autoethnographic book changes our sense of the West, here as a context for one of my favorite TV characters, and here as part of a post on fraught and crucial questions of “authenticity” and identity.
There’s a lot that I love about Winnemucca’s voice, as captured so powerfully in that aforementioned book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). But most of all I love the way she combines self-reflection and humility with pride and confidence, blends her hugely complex individual story with impassioned activism, recognizes the most multilayered realities yet refuses to allow them to stop her work. We can see that with particular clarity in the book’s final final two sentences: “Finding it impossible to do any thing for my people I did not return to Yakima, but after I left Vancouver Barracks I went to my sister in Montana. After my marriage to Mr. Hopkins I visited my people once more at Pyramid Lake Reservation, and they urged me again to come to the East and talk for them, and so I have come.” I’m so grateful that she did!
Next thanks tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?
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